McAfee: Security is Key to a Bitcoin Future

Technology pioneer and founder of the anti-virus product, John McAfee, has claimed that there is a need for a major shakeup in cryptocurrency security to prevent the virtual money world from crumbling.

This is despite his view that there will be a cryptocurrency standard for the world soon whether governments like it or not and tracking money flow would be difficult as well as the irony created by cryptocurrencies being powered by blockchain – considering its various real-world use cases in various sectors – as a system built to give anonymity also being used to identify.

“Security is the biggest problem. The hacking world hasn’t quite figured it out, but they will,” McAfee said to IBTimes UK at London’s Blockchain: Money event adding that changes have to be made to avoid chaos “not because we don’t understand it or we can’t understand the math [but] because there is no security whatsoever.”

He points out there are dangers in how people interact with their online money – namely via smartphone and how they are used to interact with Bitcoin.

He stated:

Some people have hundreds of thousands of dollars on their smartphone wallet. And I tell them – if you give me your phone number, in five minutes I will transfer all of your Bitcoins into my account. And I can prove it, it’s trivial.

McAfee cites that an iPhone, for example, was not designed to secure users and give privacy but to open up a user’s location, contacts etc hence it being a spying device as it makes the same facilities that marketers and sales people use accessible to hackers.

He said: “It’s got a microphone and a camera that can watch you – and why? Because Google, Apple, the great manufacturers realise something – we can sell these phones for $600 and [they] know where the money is, it’s information.”

McAfee heads cybersecurity firm, MGT Capital Investments which announced in July 2016 it is venturing into the bitcoin mining industry. The mining facility in Washington has begun “Phase Two” of its mining operations, which sees a goal to expand its processing power to more than five PetaHash this year.

By mid-September, the company revealed that it had generated 2.6 PetaHash in the days since its August launch, mining 90 bitcoins at the time. The company aims to expand to 10 PetaHash in the first quarter of 2017.

Virtual currency is not legal tender, is not backed by the government, and accounts and value balances are not subject to consumer protections. The information does not constitute investment advice or an offer to invest.